Court tombs are among the oldest field monuments in the country, typically consisting of an open, semicircular or oval forecourt formed by upright stones, leading into one or more roofed burial galleries. They were built by farming communities roughly five to six thousand years ago, and their forecourts are thought to have served some ceremonial function, perhaps gathering places for rituals connected with the dead or with communal life more broadly.

The Ballynastangford example is documented in the survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Volume II of the Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964, remains a foundational reference for Neolithic monuments in Mayo. De Valera and Ó Nualláin systematically recorded the court tombs of the county at a time when many were already in various states of collapse or disturbance, making their fieldwork a significant contribution to understanding how these structures were originally arranged. Mayo has a particularly dense concentration of court tombs relative to other counties, which may reflect patterns of early settlement along the western seaboard or simply the survival of monuments in areas that were never heavily cultivated or built over in later centuries.